He tilted his head, like he was considering where to start.

“When Bailey was a baby? We all took a trip to Los Angeles. It was the weekend that a tiger escaped from the Los Angeles Zoo. A young tiger, who had been at the zoo for only a year or so. He didn’t just escape his cage, but the entire premises. And he ended up in a family’s backyard in Los Feliz. When he got there, he didn’t hurt anyone. He curled up under a tree and took a nap. Olivia was consumed with this story, which is probably how she found out the other part.”

I smiled. “What’s that?”

“The family whose backyard the tiger had curled up in had gone to the zoo only a few weeks before and one of their two young boys had been obsessed with the tiger. The boy had cried when he had to leave the tiger, not understanding why he couldn’t take the tiger home with him. How do you explain that the tiger ended up at this boy’s home? A coincidence? That was what the zoologists decided. The family lived pretty close to the zoo. But Olivia thought it served as proof. That sometimes you find your way to the place that wants you most.”

“I love that story.”

“You would have loved her,” he said. Then he smiled, looked out the airplane window. “There was no way… not to love her.”

I squeezed his shoulder. “Thank you.”

He turned back toward me. “Do you feel better?”

“Not really,” I said.

He laughed. “What else do you want to know?”

I tried to think of what I was asking for—it wasn’t about Olivia. It wasn’t even about Bailey. Not exactly, at least.

“I think… I think I need you to say it out loud,” I said.

“Say what?”

“That we’re doing the right thing.”

That was the closest I could get to it—the closest way to express what I was actually worried about. I wasn’t used to being a part of a family, not since I lost my grandfather. And that didn’t exactly feel like a family. That felt like a twosome, plowing our way through the world, just me and him. His funeral was the last time I even saw my mother. Her calls on my birthday (or somewhere around my birthday) were our only form of communication at this point.

This was going to be something different. It would be the first time I was a part of an actual family. I felt completely unsure of how to do it properly, how to count on Owen, how to show Bailey she could count on me.

“We’re doing the right thing,” Owen said. “We’re doing the only thing. I swear to you, on everything that matters to me, that’s how I feel.”

I nodded, calmed. Because I believed him. And because I wasn’t really nervous, at least not about him. I knew how much I wanted him—how much I wanted to be with him. Even if I didn’t know everything about him yet, I knew that he was good. I was nervous about everything else.

He leaned in and put his lips against my forehead. “I’m not going to be that asshole who says you kinda have to trust someone at some point.”

“You’re going to be the asshole who says it without saying it?”

The airplane started backing up, jolting us, before it turned, slowly heading toward the runway.

“Apparently,” he said.

“I know I can trust you,” I said. “I do. I trust you more than anyone.”

He locked his fingers through mine.

“Metaphorically or actually?” he said.

I looked down at our fingers, locked together like that, just in time for takeoff. I stared down at them, finding comfort there.

“Here’s hoping they’re the same thing,” I said.

The Good Lawyer

When we get back to the hotel room, I lock the dead bolt behind us.

I start looking around the room, our belongings strewn on the floor, our suitcases open.

“Start packing your stuff,” I say. “Just throw it all in the suitcase, we’re out of here in the next five minutes.”

“Where are we going?”

“To rent a car and start driving home.”

“Why are we driving?” she says.

I don’t want to say the rest of it. That I don’t even want to go to the airport. That I’m afraid they’ll be looking for us there. Whoever they are. That I don’t know what her father did, but I know who he is. And anyone who reacts to him the way that Charlie reacted to him is someone we can’t trust. He’s someone we need to get away from.

“And why are we leaving now? We’re getting closer…” She pauses. “I don’t want to leave until we figure this out.”

“We will, I promise you, but not here,” I say. “Not where you could be in danger.”

She starts to argue, but I put up my hand. I rarely tell her what to do, so I know it may go south starting now. But still. She has to listen. Because we have to leave. We should be leaving already.

“Bailey,” I say. “There’s no choice. We’re in over our heads.”

Bailey looks at me surprised. Maybe she is surprised that I tell her the truth, that I don’t sugarcoat it. Maybe she just wants to be done trying to convince me that I’m wrong to head back home. I can’t read her expression. But she nods and stops arguing, so I decide to take the win.

“Okay,” she says. “I’ll pack.”

“Thank you,” I say.

“Yep…” she says.

She starts picking up her clothes and I walk into the bathroom, closing the door behind myself. I look into the mirror at my tired face. My eyes are bloodshot and dark, my skin pallid.

I splash water on my face and make myself take a few deep breaths in, trying to slow down my heartbeat—trying to slow down the crazy thoughts that are plowing through my mind, one of them finding its way to the surface anyway. What have I gotten us into here?

What do I know? What do I need to know?

I reach into my pocket, palm my phone. I cut my finger on the shattered screen, the small glass shards imbedding in my skin. I pull up Jake’s contact and send a text.

Pls get back to me on this ASAP. Katherine “Kate” Smith. That’s her maiden name. Brother Charlie Smith. Austin, Texas. Cross-reference for birth of daughter, matching Bailey’s age. Name “Kristin”. Austin, Texas. Also check for marriage certificate and death certificate. Won’t be reachable on my phone.

I put the phone under my foot and get ready to smash it. Even though it is the only way Owen can find us. It’s also the way anyone else can. And if my suspicions are right, I don’t want that. I want to get out of Austin without that happening. I want to get away from Charlie Smith and whoever may be with him.

But there is something gnawing at me, something I want to remember before I disconnect us from the world.

What is bothering me? What do I feel like I should be finding? Not Kate Smith, not Charlie Smith. Something else.

I pick up the phone and do another search for Katherine Smith, thousands of links popping up on Google for such a common name. Some that seem like they could be leading to the right Katherine but don’t: an art history professor who graduated from University of Texas at Austin; a chef born and bred on Lake Austin; an actress, who looks quite a bit like the Kate I saw in the photos at the bar. I click on the link to the actress and pull up a photograph of her in a gown.

And it comes to me in a flash: what I am trying to remember, what struck me at The Never Dry.

There was that newspaper clipping I noticed when I first arrived at the bar.

The clip included a photograph of Kate dressed in a gown. Kate in a gown, Charlie dressed in a tuxedo, the older couple bookending them. Meredith Smith. Nicholas Bell. The headline read: NICHOLAS BELL RECEIVES THE TEXAS STAR AWARD. His name was also beneath the clipping.

Nicholas Bell. Husband of Meredith Smith. She was in other photographs, but he wasn’t. Why was he in so few photographs except for that clipping? Why did his name sound familiar?

I plug in his name and then I know.

* * *

This is how the story started.

A young, handsome El Paso, Texas, Presidential Scholar was one of the first kids from his high school to attend college, let alone the University of Texas at Austin. Let alone law school.

He came from modest means, but money wasn’t his motivation for becoming a lawyer. Even after a childhood where he didn’t often know where his next meal was coming from, he turned down all sorts of job offers from firms in New York and San Francisco to become a public defender for the city of Austin. He was twenty-six years old. He was young, idealistic, and newly married to his high school sweetheart, a social worker, who had aspirations for beautiful babies, but none (at the time) for fancy houses.

His name was Nicholas but he quickly earned the nickname The Good Lawyer, handling the cases no one wanted, helping out defendants who wouldn’t have gotten a fair shake with someone who cared less.

It is unclear how Nicholas went from there to becoming the bad lawyer.